Customer Reviews

Born of the Desert: With the S.A.S. in North Africa (Greenhill Military Paperbacks)

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At a period when Britian stood alone, in Northern Africa a group began harassing Rommel and the Axis behind their lines. They lived off the land, evaded capture after every raid, and were so far over the top the only TV series made about them was considered too unbelievable (The show was called "The Rat Patrol"). To hide the group they were given a meaningless name - Special Air Services, and a series of unit id's that hid the real size. This is about the early days in the SAS by the original medical officer. It was written at the end of the war but the events were still very vivid to him. His descriptions of the people involved with the SAS and the day-to-day activities are enlightening. Compared with today's exploitation books, reading stories about how they would blow-up 40 planes in an evening then only report 25 so they weren't accused of overstating their accomplishments and the ways the German's would always hunt them down after a raid, make me appreciate how brave these people were compared with the false bravado of today's books about the special forces.

Highly recommended.

Born Of The Desert by Malcolm James is a personal account of Dr. Malcolm James Pleydell's time spent as the medical officer for the 1st Special Air Service (SAS) during the World War II battles in North Africa during 1942 - 1943. It is a very good book to read about the experiences of both SAS and Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) personnel in the hostile desert as they returned from raids against the Italians and Germans or prepared for their next ones. As the raiders' only doctor and thus too valuable to participate directly in their raids, Malcolm cannot describe the attacks first hand but can only convey what he learned from those who returned. He does an excellent job on the few he reports on but I had hoped that he would have covered more of them and to greater detail. However, Malcolm does describe his experience and the terror of enemy searches for fleeing raiding parties. He won a Military Cross (MC) for his treatment of wounded SAS personnel during the straffing and bombing of Axis airplanes seeking revenge for the frequent and often successful attacks on their airfields. Malcolm does a fine job of conveying the beauty and wonder of the harsh desert encountered during his trips from SAS headquarters outside Cairo to hidden SAS base camps. I think his book would make an excellent movie! I gave it 4 of 5 stars only because it primarily covered the behind the scenes activities of the SAS in North Africa and did not fully cover all of the SAS military actions. Of course, Malcolm wrote the book during the latter part of the war years and so perhaps he had to keep hush on some of the things I would have liked to have read about.